After hearing Erin and Tim book talk this novel, I picked it up because I wanted to see if I could get through it. It sounded so intense and disturbing that I decided to make it my "stretch" book. It is technically in that category of YA that can be referred to as "issue lit," and I only say this because while books in this category might all share certain elements, I don't think there is a universally accepted formula for what constitutes an issue book. In this case, let me just say that the girl in the story goes through traumatic events that count as issues that some unfortunate young girls might go through.
The girl is abducted at 10 years old and is physically and sexually abused for the next five years by "Ray," a controlling psychopath who calls her Alice and threatens her with death if she tries to leave him or seek help from anyone.
There are different ways that an author can create a world that is hopeless and depressing--which fills the reader with an intense unease and feelings of dread--but I found that a tasteful presentation of these methods of writing is not present in Living Dead Girl. The intent of the voice and style is clearly meant to be "in your face" (as so many internet reviews like to vaguely describe it) but in this case the entire work seems more like an unrelenting foray into the personal experiences of a victim of sexual captivity. While there is an amount of interesting word play scattered throughout Alice's broken and emotionless narrative, that narrative as a whole is a monotonous litany of seething meditations on graphic, overly-explicit scenes of abuse.
I find that my preference for literature almost unfailingly includes stories where I never actively think--mid-story--about the author penning the book one page at a time. It is my experience that the mark of good literature is that it removes the author from the equation completely, leaving the reader to experience the world the author has created as a separate experience than something that was made up by the person writing it.
In this case, from beginning to end I could think of nothing but how Elizabeth Scott, the author, was at some point in time researching first-hand events and thinking up one brutal scene after another so that she could compile them all into this one tedious novel. Scott has said in interviews that she had recurring nightmares about Alice's story and felt as though she needed to write it down.
It is not my intention to put aside the gravity of the issue of child abduction and abuse, nor do I want to wrongly assume anything about Scott, but by the way the story dives into such tortured and nihilistic prose with its endless examples of abuse, I feel like Scott may have been too enamored with the "idea" of a sex slave while writing, using Alice's situation as a channel through which she could explore her ability to push the envelope of controversial writing.
My stance on this book is not that it is controversial. On the contrary, I find very little about it that is controversial. There are untold millions of books that have gotten negative press for far more graphic and sensitive subject matter. I think that the book is just a big letdown, to tell you the truth. I don't feel as though the overall "message" is one that anybody can learn from, particularly anyone in grades 9 and up. I think Scott could have done a lot with her chance to shed light on an as-of-yet untouched societal hazard, but she squandered that chance to instead portray a hopeless narrative which ultimately falls under some sort of shock-horror-fiction genre. My ultimate stance is still that Living Dead Girl is a tasteless exploration of human depravity. Many other books have handled darker subjects, though through their quality of writing they have become masterpieces.
"There is no such thing as a 'moral' or an 'immoral' book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all."
-Oscar Wilde
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